


Arrival: Imminent

by orphan_account



Series: Dark Interval [1]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Distant future, Gen, Holiday Harbinger, post-Control, post-merger Milkdromeda, soft sci-fi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-06 21:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13420194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In the distant future, Andromeda and the Milky Way have collided and merged. Few recognizable remnants from the lifetimes of Jane Shepard and Scott Ryder remain, but life went on after them – and on, and on, and on....





	Arrival: Imminent

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally planned to be the first part of a trilogy written as part of the 2017 Holiday Harbinger gift exchange. Background and world-building can be found at its companion blog: terminal4892871.tumblr.com. However, it will not be completed. See ending notes for how the story would have played out.

Currently observing the _Shrinking Thread_ , a ʿksin class L personal starship (S2).  
**dimensions** : 307m x 101m x 23m  
**max speed** : ~5939kc  
**invoker** : Uvvayas Kaerval, ʿksin [Council, late Middle Extant] of the Nineteenth Chorus (S1.97)  
**passenger** : ‘Stitia’, volucriite [Council, early Emergent] of unknown affiliation (S0)  
**cargo** : sixteen (16) 5m x 5m x 17m luggage crates containing personal belongings; one (1) 1m x 1m x 1m storage crate, contents unknown  
**destination** : Rayn/Ta system (anticipated via wu/Citadel)  
**arrival** : imminent; deceleration underway  
**present velocity** : 2.23kc and falling

* * *

 

Uvvayas Kaerval dozed nonchalantly in the blocky bridge compartment of his ship, settled on his many haunches. All around him, the status feeds of several screens and consoles scrolled continuously, the amber light of their displays casting highlights against his sleek red fur. The forward bulkhead was transparent on the bridge, but since the _Shrinking Thread_ was presently travelling at warp velocity, all that could be seen ahead of it (with biological eyes, at least) was a bright blue-white line surrounded by an undulating, blue-shifted corona.

Kaerval was huge even for a ʿksin, a species that supposedly averaged four and three-quarters of a metre in length when fully extended. He was all squat, solid muscle, but _long_ , with a great many joints per each of his four powerful legs. Four arms on his mid-upper body were almost as strong as his legs, and two additional, smaller arms within reach of his mouthparts sported more delicate manipulator digits. Except for his face and hands, which were purplish black, his whole body was covered in silky russet fur.

His extremely deep yet surprisingly gentle snores caused his spiny mouthparts to vibrate as they gradually inflated and deflated, producing slow waves of noise that filled the bridge every time they crested. This happened about two or three times a minute.

As the latest snore was rumbling into its upcycle, a lithe, angular shape slipped onto the bridge.

Keeping two of her four bright green eyes locked on the snoozing ʿksin crouched amidst his consoles, Stitia quietly tip-taloned her way around the edge of the room towards the communications console. She was a volucriite, a species of average-sized (small to the ʿksin) bipeds with metallic carapaces, keen vision, and distinctive cranial crests.

Stitia was not exactly a friend of Kaerval’s. Indeed, after seven and a half days of his intermittent company, she was not even convinced that she counted as one of his casual acquaintances. It was not that he treated her coldly or unkindly; he was quite the opposite. It was just that she could not escape the feeling that at least part of the reason he seemed to like her so much was because her species was so fascinatingly... _primitive_ compared to his.

And, if she was honest with herself, he still frightened her rather severely.

Millions of years more advanced than volucriites, ʿksin conducted their lives and societies over correspondingly different spans of time and space. At the height of their first true golden age – the dawn of their interstellar history – ancestors of volucriites had not yet been walking upright, let alone speaking or building cities, and they would not be for another thirty-eight million years after that.

Stitia had never even _heard_ of the ʿksin until about eight days ago. (She still could not really pronounce the word, and had stopped trying within Kaerval’s earshot.) Under ordinary circumstances, the two species would never have made contact with one another – having no cause to be within the same star systems, let alone travel on the same small ship. Yet here she was.

In the days since they’d left Hievral Station, Stitia had not been able to stop thinking about a certain kind of animal from her homeworld. They were called _kaibos_ ; she had seen them in zoos on Volucr. Beings of near-volucriite intelligence that shared with them a recent common ancestor and over ninety-five percent of their DNA, today _kaibos_ were an endangered species – kept alive solely by captive breeding programs and volucriite veterinary science.

The one thought that kept coming back and chilling Stitia anew was that ʿksin civilization was much _further_ in advance of volucriites than volucriites were of _kaibos_.

Yet in spite of the yawning chasms of historical and technological mass that separated their species, both volucriites and ʿksin had at least one thing in common: they were both members of the Citadel Council.

The Council was an interstellar diplomatic-administrative polity, the ancient scaffolding of a meta-civilization. Based out of an enormous megastructure-habitat called the Citadel, it was the heart of a diverse community of intelligent life. The Council bound its members together with the shared values of peaceful coexistence, scientific and economic cooperation, cultural exchange, and rendering aid to one’s allies in times of need.

It was in the spirit of that last, no doubt, that Kaerval had offered her a place aboard his ship when he’d found her essentially hitchhiking at Hievral Station. It was a small Council exclave that presided over a cluster of mass relays in the neutral space between the territories of several of its member species – among them, volucriites and ʿksin.

Hievral Station was on the far side of the galaxy from the Rayn system, where the Council was based and where Stitia had needed to get as soon as possible. Kaerval had happened to be on the station and about to depart for RaynTa, which was less than a system radius away from the Citadel at wuRayn.

Stitia, jumpy and on the run, had been scared half out of her wits to be approached by such a huge, unfamiliar being. Her nerve had nearly failed her as she’d stammered out answers to his questions.

Yet none of those questions had even skirted around what seemed to her like the biggest, most obvious ones. If she needed to cross the galaxy in such a hurry, why wasn’t she travelling on a volucriite ship? Her people had been members of the Council for centuries prior to her birth; there was plenty of regular traffic between Volucr and Rayn that could have taken her. Why was she instead taking a chance with aliens she didn’t know?

Kaerval had never asked. Nor had he once ever inquired about the large, sealed box that Stitia had had with her on the station, and which she’d kept meticulously within her sight until the moment it was secured in his ship’s cargo bay.

None of it seemed to interest him. What he _had_ wanted to know about was her – her life, her homeworld, her people. And he’d wanted to share, to tell her about _his_ people and _his_ world.

For all the trouble Stitia still had reading his alien expressions and emotive cues, it was quite obvious to her that all Kaerval had really wanted from the beginning was company on the trip to Rayn. He’d intimidated her (and still did), but a few conversations had seemed like a small price to pay in return for what he was offering. So she’d taken him up.

She couldn’t afford not to, really. She suppressed a shiver just thinking about it. It was only a matter of time before her pursuers caught up to her, and the next person who’d taken an interest in an lone, hunted volucriite travelling with a mysterious package might not have been nearly so benign.

Since she’d boarded his ship, the _Shrinking Thread_ , Kaerval had welcomed Stitia into his private little world. The ship had rapidly reconfigured itself and replicated bits of this and that until she had quite a comfortable set of living quarters, complete with luxurious bathing facilities and filling, enjoyable meals every day. (Kaerval needed none of these things, but it had been some time since Stitia had seen their like, and she was only too happy to make full use of them.) He asked her to spend some time with him on the bridge each day of their journey, but otherwise he left her alone to do as she wished.

He’d continued to respect her privacy regarding the box, never remarking on how frequently she returned to the cargo hold to check on it.

He even promised to take her directly to the Citadel at wuRayn, getting her to her destination that much more quickly. According to the Pan-galactic AC, wuRayn and RaynTa were presently on opposite sides of their sun. It was only half a system radius or so out of his way... but still.

Indeed, Kaerval had been nothing but kind and accommodating to her since they’d met. He’d done more for her in the past seven days than most members of her own species had in a hundred times as long, and he had asked for astonishingly little in return. From their initial meeting until right now, although she often had the uncomfortable feeling of a bug under a microscope, Stitia had never once detected the slightest trace of deliberate condescension, malevolence, or even faint ill humour on Kaerval’s part. Even his _snores_ sounded eerily... comforting.

And yet here she was, sneaking onto the bridge of his ship like she’d stowed away rather than being invited aboard. Like she was a thief – or a fugitive.

It worried Stitia that behaving this way had become second nature to her.

It didn’t help her nerves that, whatever uncanny tone she imagined was present in Kaerval’s snores, their vibrations crawling up the sensitive skin of her spine made her feel as though a great predator was looming just behind her with its awesome jaws poised to snap closed around her body. Nor did it do her much good that all of the consoles on the _Shrinking Thread_ were about level with her chin, forcing her to stand on talon-tip to be able to even see them.

She managed it, though. Behind her, Kaerval snorted and snuffled through his mouthparts, mumbling something in his sleep that sounded, if not coherent, then at least content.

Now, at last, Stitia started to feel a little bit silly. Maybe not _every_ span of time and space on which the ʿksin lived was entirely different from hers.

Unfortunately, the divide still dwarfed the commonality. Even the simplest technology on the _Shrinking Thread_ was so far beyond anything Stitia was familiar with that she would have been utterly helpless to operate it without assistance. Fortunately, she had that assistance from the Pan-galactic AC, which had furnished her omni-tool with adaptive software.

The PAC was an ArchAI, a high-singularity hyperintelligence that had long ago scattered itself throughout the galaxy. It was an old, old machine –older than Kaerval’s people, although not (perhaps) quite as old as the Citadel. It had multiple highly useful functions, but its primary directive was to answer whatever questions it was asked. This made it indispensable enough for navigating the galaxy as a regular citizen, let alone as a hunted outcast.

There were few known limits to the kinds of questions the PAC could answer. If it didn’t already know, it would do its best to find out. That was the awesome power of the PAC – that, and the fact that one could contact it and ask it things in virtually any star system within two hundred thousand light-years of the galactic core.

Stitia’s omni-tool, a handheld device of Citadel technology that used a holographic interface, now blinked and bipped, its circular orange glow rotating erratically back and forth in her palm. As she held it out towards the _Shrinking Thread_ ’s communications console, the PAC spun a custom interface before her eyes – one that offered commands in a language she understood.

As sophisticated as this kind of ‘answer’ to a question was, it barely scratched the surface of what the PAC was capable of. Stitia had discovered – was still discovering – that the ancient ArchAI was quite prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to answer particularly _big_ questions.

At last (it took only a minute or two, but it felt like longer with her omni-tool buzzing almost imperceptibly against her carapace every time one of Kaerval’s snores crested), Stitia gained access to the Council communications cloud.

She was expecting a reply to a message she’d sent when she first boarded Kaerval’s ship. She found one. Three eyes scanned it rapidly, absorbing all the relevant information and committing the shape of its text to memory. Then she fired off a quick acknowledgement and deleted both the ship’s and the cloud’s records of the exchange. She had her place and time.

Almost as soon as Stitia had cleaned up the last online traces of her presence, an alarm began to blare on a console behind her. Kaerval immediately stirred and grunted, shuddered out of his nap.

Stitia’s hearts leapt into her throat. Lightning-quick, trying to be as quiet as possible, she finished what she was doing, wiped the custom interface from her omni-tool, and darted out of the room.

To be sure, there was _no reason_ to be this surreptitious. Kaerval knew the PAC was helping her use his ship’s technology; she’d done it once before, after all, at the beginning of their trip together.

And yet... and yet. Years of very justified paranoia had instilled certain habits in Stitia, habits that she had a hard time resisting – even here and now, on this ship, where she was probably safer than she ever had been in her life. Certainly safer than she was ever likely to be again. The thought depressed her.

Once in the corridor and safely away from his line of sight, Stitia pressed her back against the wall beside the entrance to the bridge, listening intently. Now and then she peered around the edge of the threshold, never daring to reveal more of herself than a single eye.

The alarm soon stopped, replaced by the deep, humming voice of the _Shrinking Thread_ speaking out of the console. Stitia didn’t understand the ʿksin language it used, but the PAC translated it for her virtually in real-time, so she heard both versions speaking overtop of one another: the comprehensible, genderless and unaccented, and the not, an almost melodic series of low-pitched hoots, warbles, swishes, and clicks. Both voices were deep and clearly robotic.

“Our arrival in the Rayn system is imminent. I have prepared the warp lens for sub-light incarnation and inertial bleed. Kaerval, you asked me to wake you when we reached this point in our journey.”

“Mmhm! Aha. Yes.” Snort. _Buzzzz_. “Yes I did, Ship. Thank you.”

Kaerval’s voice was even deeper than the ship’s – as deep as he was big. His language was guttural, but not abrasive. He grunted and whistled as he shook off the last of his doze, his limb segments shuffling this way and that. His mouthparts slowly ballooned up and down a few times, and he started to unfolded a few of his many knees from their stable resting stance.

“Mmhm,” Kaerval said presently. “Well, how goes the journey? Have you heard back from Ivvrumir?”

“The journey proceeds on schedule,” replied the _Shrinking Thread_. “Yes. Ivvrumir continues to insist that in spite of what happened last time, he _is_ glad that you’re coming to visit him again. However, he asked me to pass along a request.”

“Oh?” Kaerval sounded interested. “Go on, then.”

“You are asked, for the duration of your stay,” the ship said delicately, “to limit the number of Shattered Lineages from which you _simultaneously_ invite ‘extras’ into Ivvrumir’s symphony to less than or equal to the number of functioning gonads your clade’s biotemplate still possesses.”

“ **Ha!** ”

Stitia swore she could feel the force of Kaerval’s laughter resonating in her chest cavity as it seemed to boom throughout the entire ship. The fingers on his hind set of hands fluttered delightedly.

“Of course, of _course_ he said that, the flebbit-soaked clef-raker!” Kaerval chortled after indulging his mirth for a good minute or so. “Oh, it’s been such a long time, far _too_ long. How I’ve missed him! I’m so pleased that I finally decided to take this trip.”

“We are agreed on all counts,” said the _Shrinking Thread_ with considerable feeling. “On a personal note, do please try to remember who talked you into this when you inevitably lose patience with your shatterlings’ inadequacies and simply have Ivvrumir rake your clef, as happens _every_ _single_ _time_ you visit RaynTa.”

There was a beat in which Kaerval didn’t reply. Slowly, Stitia edged first one eye, then two around the threshold to peer into the room.

“Ship,” Kaerval said while pulling some screens and consoles closer to him and beginning to dance his many fingers across them, “sometimes you shouldn’t say a thing even if it’s true.”

“I shall express my feelings as I deign appropriate. Brace for barrier transit.”

Kaerval’s focus remained on his screens as the _Shrinking Thread_ shuddered minutely. There was a brief, painless sensation of full-body stretching as the elliptical warp corona that was visible outside the ship abruptly died away.

“Sub-light incarnation successful,” the _Shrinking Thread_ announced.

Stitia extended a third eye around the threshold. Although she’d known they were almost there, she was still floored by how short the trip had been – less than half of what she’d expected.

More immediately amazing was the apparent total lack of need for a long deceleration into the system. Moments ago, the ship had been travelling thousands of times faster than lightspeed. Now, in the blink of an eye, it was cruising sedately towards the world ahead of it, no worse for the wear. _That_ was incredible.

Stitia barely noticed that the newly-visible stars outside the ship were unfamiliar. They had dropped out of warp very near a planet that could only be wuRayn, an excellent view of which now dominated the transparent bulkhead.

It was a vivid, blue-green marble, swirled with smatterings of white clouds and storms. A slice of it was in shadow, but there were lights visible along the darkened limb. More bright points danced around it in orbit, doubtless numbering far more than were visible at this distance.

In many ways wuRayn resembled Volucr, Stitia’s homeworld. In other ways it was clearly an alien planet. There was something achingly, ineffably beautiful about its unfamiliar promise of hospitality, and she suppressed a mournful shudder as a wave of homesickness made her gut tighten.

The planet itself was not even all there was to see. WuRayn was famous throughout the galaxy for many reasons, one of which was the Citadel itself. The administrative, cultural, and economic heart of the Citadel Council was a massive, multi-tiered orbital megastructure that encircled the planet. Its outermost ring, called the Halo, was nearly fifty thousand kilometres in diameter.

Just as famous as the Citadel were its Keepers, an ancient lineage of caretaker species. Amongst the Keepers was a clade of starship-sized robots called Guardians, said to be older than the galaxy itself. Many cultures revered the Keepers and the Guardians in particular because of their ability to ecoform sterile worlds, transforming them into habitable planets ripe for colonization in just centuries. The Keepers’ primary duties, though, were to the Citadel and the mass relay network.

Stitia had seen images of Guardians before, so she knew what they looked like. If there were any out and about on the Citadel, they were too far away for her to make out, even as she peered around the corner with all four eyes.

The _Shrinking Thread_ was approaching wuRayn approximately level with the system ecliptic. Although the Halo was one hundred kilometres wide, at this distance it was visible only as a line of dark grey metal and lights that bisected wuRayn and arced into space for a considerable distance to either side of it. The rest of the Citadel was invisible, obscured behind the Halo.

Despite how far Volucr was from Rayn, her people had long been aware of the Citadel. She had never been here before, but somewhere in the megastructure ahead of her was a flourishing, centuries-old volucriite embassy and cultural centre.

She wondered if the embassy staff had been alerted that she was coming. Surely Volucr had put out a galaxy-wide warrant for her arrest by now.

Eventually, Kaerval looked up from whatever had engrossed him on his console.

“Aha! Excellent,” he said. “We’re here. Ship, what’s our passenger up to at the moment?”

“She is standing in the corridor just outside the bridge, eight point five metres behind you and to your heartside,” replied the _Shrinking Thread_.

Stitia tensed and whipped her eyes back out of view of the bridge, suddenly aware of just how obvious she was, how careless she’d allowed herself to become over the past few minutes. Then... slowly, she relaxed, lowering her forehead into one hand as a wave of _feeling-like-a-complete-idiot_ washed through her.

Of _course_ the _Shrinking Thread_ would know where she was. It was a sapient being – it was smarter than she was – and she was inside its body. It probably knew where she was at all times, since the moment she’d stepped aboard.

Technology talking at her was nothing new. It was easy to forget what the PAC was; it only ever _answered_ questions, after all, it never asked any of its own. But the idea that there might actually be an intelligence, a _will_ behind that robotic voice – let alone one that was orders of magnitude more intelligent than the smartest volucriite could ever hope to be – still unsettled Stitia deeply. Even as she’d listened to the ship banter with Kaerval, she had somehow failed to consciously make the connection that it was the being whose body she was standing in that was speaking to him, and not a person on the other end of a comm line.

“What?” Kaerval sounded surprised, legs shuffling around a bit while Stitia dealt with her emotions. “What’s she doing out there?”

“She was in here shortly before I woke you, sending furtive messages through the Council cloud,” the ship informed him. “As we neared Rayn space, she seemed to summarily develop and give into an urgent need to adjust her onboard position by about ten metres.”

“Furtive,” Kaerval repeated contemplatively. “Mmhm. I see.”

By that point Stitia had mustered as much composure as she was going to, and entered the bridge.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry for being – furtive. I didn’t mean to-”

Kaerval held up one of his eight-fingered hands in a gesture of pause, and she stopped. Some of the claws on the ends of his fingers were longer than her scalp crest was from root to tip.

“No need for explanations,” Kaerval said. “Stitia... whatever reason you might have for travelling across the Midcloud on a ʿksin vessel, I promise you that it shall be no concern of ours unless you wish it to be. Ship and I are just happy to have been of help.”

Stitia exhaled as weary gratitude seemed to slowly settle down through her from crest to talons. A little of the long-held tension in her body let go.

“Thank you, Kaerval,” she said sincerely.

WuRayn and the Citadel had already grown noticeably larger in the viewer as they approached. The arc of megastructure that the _Shrinking Thread_ was approaching was busy with ships, bots, and blinking lights.

“Welcome to Rayn,” said the _Shrinking Thread_.

Stitia clicked her talons in the affirmative, trying to run some calculations in her head since asking the PAC would have necessitated speaking aloud. They had left Hievral Station seven and a half subjective days ago, and (to her knowledge) in that time they had not stopped once and barely changed course. As the photon flew, they had covered over a hundred and sixteen thousand light years.

Not bad. Doubtless, wondrous ʿksin technology was responsible. Stitia had only ever previously travelled on ships that used mass relays to cover long distances – but to make this same trip using the mass relay network would have taken twice as long, maybe even longer.

Mass relays were anchored by necessity at the very outskirts of star systems. Primary connections were often far apart, necessitating secondary connections to reach them. Things like heavy traffic at primary relays and how often one’s ship’s needed to discharge its drive core could affect the length of the trip. And once you finally reached the nuRayn Nexus, the cloud of tens of thousands of mass relays at the edge of the Rayn system, you would need to go through customs....

It boiled down to this: after zipping across the galaxy millions of times faster than light for just a few days, coming to an abrupt near-halt _already_ deep in the system and essentially right on top of her destination was pretty mind-blowing.

“How was this possible?” Stitia asked.

The _Shrinking Thread_ did not ask what she meant. “The Keepers maintain inertial bleed hyperchannels around every inhabited world in this system. The channels allow a ship able to make use of them to drop out of warp and decelerate to interplanetary cruising velocity with _vast_ efficiency.”

It sounded positively delighted. Kaerval murmured his approval. Stitia just blinked and gazed at the encroaching Citadel with all of her eyes.

She was able to pick out finer and finer details of the megastructure’s exterior rim as they approached. Many of its lights were moving, attached to ships, bots, and other vehicles. The _Shrinking Thread_ gradually added labels and additional amber points of light here and there on the display, indicating what various visible features were as well as the names and positions of ships and bots.

Dozens of the latter were visible working here and there across the megastructure’s hull. Tall, individually unique and colourful bipedal platforms, each bore a single large lamp-like eye. These, Stitia recalled, could only be Jaat, another species of Keeper.

Endless docking bays became apparent, most of them in use. Ships came and went from the megastructure at all times and in huge numbers. There seemed to be as many variations in configuration as there were ships themselves, and the docking bays ranged in size to accommodate them all – from those much smaller than the _Shrinking Thread_ all the way up to those much, much larger.

One of Stitia’s roving eyes caught something so interesting that her three others immediately snapped to the same focus. She had never seen one with her own eyes, but she recognized a Guardian when she saw it.

Stitia watched in fascination as the gargantuan, quadrupedal, almost insectoid robot marched across the Citadel’s exterior, its limb-tips keeping it anchored to an exhaust plain. Its black metallic body was dully reflective, which was why she hadn’t noticed it against the dark grey metal of the Citadel from a distance. They were closer now, however, and she could also see hints of a sapphire glow shining from a few of the spaces around the Guardian’s joints.

As she watched it, another large central light of the same deep blue opened right in the middle of its vaguely triangular body. Like a single staring eye, it swiveled around and pointed – directly at the _Shrinking Thread_.

Stitia’s hearts stopped, but the ‘eye contact’ lasted only a split second. It was over so rapidly that she could not be sure if the Guardian had looked at them deliberately or had just happened to catch them in a sweep of its gaze.

Either way, it didn’t look at them again, and it was several minutes before Stitia’s heartrate returned to normal.

There was a high volume of traffic, but space was big. There was plenty of room for the _Shrinking Thread_ to come alongside the Halo and match its speed of rotation.

Stitia had heard that Jaunting worked over much longer distances, and supposedly it did, but for whatever reason the _Shrinking Thread_ had decided to come this close before it sent her over.

That was something else she was unused to: travelling between station and ship or vice versa by literally walking through a temporary wormhole passage. The technology required to use the Jauntweb, the source of the wormholes, was far beyond volucriites – beyond anything even the PAC could spin a custom interface for (at least, not without a lot more time).

Fortunately, volucriites needed no cybernetic modifications to be able to Jaunt safely, and the _Shrinking Thread_ could open passages for her. That was how she’d originally boarded the ship – and how she got between decks inside it, for the ship had neither airlocks nor internal hatches.

Stitia had debated asking why the ship was designed that way, but in the end had decided to simply trust the ʿksin builders’ judgement. In the grand scheme of things, this particular _why_ wasn’t that important to her.

She bit back a sigh as spiritual fatigue suddenly made her shoulders sag. She was a hundred and sixteen thousand light years from home, estranged from her family and her entire species for asking _why_ one too many times – for trying to make them all see what was so obvious to her.

 _Why_ had gotten her shunned, vilified, cast out, and finally hunted by her own kind. _Why_ had pulled her across the galaxy in search of it, into the company of alien intelligences as far removed from her as she was from the burrowing crystal shrews of Volucr’s prehistoric past.

WuRayn was not even Stitia’s final destination. Per the PAC’s instructions, it was only the latest stop on her journey.

Sometimes... it seemed as if that journey would never end.

“Where will you go next?” Stitia asked Kaerval.

“I’m headed for the moons of RaynTa,” he said. “It’s been many a longcycle since I last saw my friend Ivvrumir. We have a great deal of catching up to do. I suspect that I shall be in the system for quite some time – centuries at least by the Council’s clock. If you’re still here when I’m ready to depart, Stitia, you’re welcome to ride with me back towards the Luminous Veil.”

Stitia blinked at him with one eye at a time, entirely unsure how to respond. She would be dead well before _one_ standard Council century had passed.

Finally she managed to say “Thank you, Kaerval,” in a fairly normal tone of voice.

“We are within Jaunting range of the Citadel,” Kaerval said. “Why don’t you go check on your package and make sure that it’s in order? When you’re ready, just say the word, and Ship will beam you across.”

Stitia cringed internally at the thought of going back to keeping continuous watch over the _thing_. It had been so nice, being able to sleep for hours at a time without waking up in a cold sweat with anxiety over it.

Knowing she had no choice, Stitia steeled herself and clicked her talons.

“Very well,” she said. “From my true heart, thank you again for everything, Uvvayas Kaerval. May the Deep Ones never demand a tribute you cannot pay.”

He gave her an unreadable look, likely reflecting some confusion due to his total lack of context for the religious benediction she’d just imparted, but it lasted only for a moment. His mouthparts undulated slowly from one side to the other in a display that, while deeply unsettling, denoted (according to the PAC, anyway) sombre respect and farewell amongst the ʿksin.

“Go in concord, Stitia of Volucr,” he said.

Stitia returned the spirit of the gesture with a similar one from her own culture, first showing him the palms of her hands and then then folding them across her chest and bowing her head. Then she turned and set off down the corridor.

A few moments later, unseen and unheard by Stitia, Kaerval leaned in close to one of the consoles.

“Ship, between the two of us,” he murmured in as quiet a rumble as his mouthparts could produce, “just what _is_ in that mysterious container of hers?”

“When you tacitly agreed not to look inside it, she would have assumed that I would not either,” replied the _Shrinking Thread_ , also in an undertone. “Therefore I did not. Whatever it is, her secrecy is clearly important to her.”

“Mmhm,” Kaerval agreed. “It is at that.”

∞

Much of the space in the _Shrinking Thread_ ’s cargo hold was taken up by huge containers with an odd texture. They were glossy grey and hard like diamond, but pitted and scratched all over with artful loops and swirls that exposed a dark, coarse undersurface. There were a _lot_ of them, but Stitia supposed a being of Kaerval’s size needed a lot of stuff for a visit that would last centuries.

Nestled somewhere amidst these almost building-sized containers was the ceramic box that she’d brought about with her. Stitia knew exactly where it was, but her paranoia still made her tense up as she rounded the corner of the last large ʿksin container, half-expecting hers to be gone.

It was there. She relaxed, marginally.

Stitia disengaged the box’s DNA-coded lock with a talon, causing it to enter an ‘activated’ state. Spines of embedded actuators flexed into position, pushing the box’s sides outward slightly. At that point all it took was a touch to a disguised switch to make the box unfold, its sides collapsing and withdrawing into the base.

Stitia took a step back and touched her talons to her opposing elbows anxiously, staring down at the large, sea-green orb that swirled and flickered with murky luminescence behind a translucent containment field.

No voices, no compulsions emanated from the orb’s iridescent depths; while encapsulated by the field, it was completely inert. Except for the constantly shifting visual patterns, it might have been an unusually smooth and round hunk of rock.

She was safe from it. So was Kaerval, so was everyone on the Citadel and wuRayn. Stitia took slow, deep breaths, soothing herself by repeatedly tapping the rough carapace around her elbows.

It was nothing short of a miracle that she’d managed to smuggle this thing off Volucr and all the way out to Hievral Station without getting caught. She’d coasted on that providence all the way to Rayn.

It seemed like she’d lost her pursuers when Kaerval had picked her up, but who could say for sure? Stitia knew her enemies well, and there was no way they’d have just let her get away with the artifact. It might take them some time to find out where she’d taken it, but eventually they would.

She couldn’t let her guard down now. She’d been caught unawares before, thinking herself safe, and had barely survived to regret the error.

But the more she thought about what she would have to do on wuRayn, the less she liked it. This wasn’t exactly an out-of-the-way system where she could lurk for months – it was a major nucleus of galactic meta-civilization. There might well be people waiting for her on the Citadel already.

How much further could she possibly travel down this path before they finally caught up to her? Was wuRayn to be the final stop on her journey, after all?

Stitia stared into the orb, forehead plates around the base of her eyes slowly tightening as she reiterated well-worn mental paths. Anger, desperation, dread; she’d had these same thoughts about the other stops along her journey, too.

Ultimately, she came to the same conclusion that she always did: she had no choice but to continue, to keep going until she reached the end or couldn’t _go_ any more. She had come a long, long way to have her question answered, and she knew she would go yet further before she was done.

The orb was inert and secure. Stitia closed and re-locked the box, then called up a link on her omni-tool and raised it towards her mouth.

“I’ve reached wuRayn,” she said to the PAC. “What should I do?”

A reply appeared instantaneously in the form of text. A single word: _Proceed with the instructions I have given you_.

Stitia nodded. So be it.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is how this story would have played out.  
> Stitia's orb is the last remaining Leviathan artifact. It had been corrupting her peoples' government for centuries, directing them to secretly build an army of warships with which they intended to attack the Terminal Library. She alone had discovered this fact and managed to steal the artifact away, but her people were hunting her down to recover it and place her under its thrall.  
> A single ancient Leviathan remains. It is the progeny of those Shepard once encountered, and the progenitor of another generation of Leviathans that were all killed by the Guardians (descendants of post-control Reapers and geth) during the Merger of the two galaxies when they once again attempted to gain dominion over all other species.  
> Stitia's question to the PAC was "How can I free my people?"  
> Its "answer" took the form of an elaborate plan to lead her around the galaxy, attracting the attention of every remaining Leviathan agent until they were all on her trail. This would serve to gather them all in one place for a final confrontation at the Terminal Library, a massive archive dating back billions of years.  
> The Leviathan, utterly insane from long eons of isolation and hatred for the smaller races that had took what it perceived belong to the Leviathans, planned to use its last remaining agents to breach the Library. There, it intended to awaken an ancient archived copy of Shepard's mind, which it hoped to enthrall and use to replicate the feat Shepard once accomplished herself: taking control over the Guardians (Reapers). Separated by vast gulfs of time from that historical event, however, the Leviathan is unaware that Shepard would need a Crucible to accomplish such a feat, and besides the Guardians were no longer linked to a single hive mind (as the Catalyst once was).  
> The Leviathan's agents eventually confront Stitia as well as the allies and friends she has gathered (including awakened archived minds of Shepard, Garrus, Ryder, and Reyes) at the Terminal Library, demanding they hand over the Shepard mind. Powerful Interfectors, members of an Elder civilization, accompany the Leviathan agents, as they under its thrall. However, when the Leviathan realizes that its plan is impossible, it becomes crazed and attacks.  
> Shepard and Ryder succesfully defeat the Interfectors using Library automata as bodies and destroy the last Leviathan artifact. The Interfectors and other thralls, freed from their enslavement, depart. The last Leviathan, cut off from the rest of the galaxy, is assumed to eventually die in isolation. The volucriite government no longer hunts Stitia and she is welcomed to return home. Shepard and the others from her time return to their archival slumber, and life goes on.


End file.
